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Dave Blundin

Dave Blundin is serial entrepreneur and investor in software, internet and AI companies. He has co-founded 17 companies and served on 21 public & private boards. One of his earliest achievements was the founding of internet personalization company, DataSage, which was subsequently acquired for over $600M. During that time, Dave was named to MIT Technology Review’s list of top innovators under 35. In the nomination, venture capitalist Duncan McCallum called Dave "the most visionary person I have ever met" in the field of decision-support software.

Today, Dave is the CEO of Cogo Labs, a big-data venture accelerator located next to MIT in Cambridge, MA. Cogo Labs' mission is to provide anything that helps a startup grow quickly, including several multi-petabyte data assets that help entrepreneurs discover and quickly vet new business ideas. Dave spends most of his time at Cogo Labs mentoring and coaching young management teams to accelerate the impact of technology on society.

The Cogo Labs incubation process has led Dave to become the chairman of 12 companies, including EverQuote which has annual revenue of over $100M and JobCase which has 65 million registered users. He is also the chairman and founding CEO of Vestmark, which manages nearly $1TN in US assets. As an investor, Dave is the managing partner of Link Ventures, a venture fund focused on consumer-facing internet companies, and also general partner of Vestigo Ventures, a seed stage fin-tech venture fund. Dave's seed-stage investments include e-Dialog, CarGurus, TodayTix, and RocketTravel.

Aside from the "science of startups," Dave has a deep interest in artificial intelligence. Inspired by Marvin Minsky's writings at the age of 12, Dave developed a lifelong passion for AI and what Ray Kurzweil later coined "The Singularity." As an undergraduate at the MIT AI lab, Dave worked in Minsky's "annex" which gave him access to all of Minsky's writings - both personal and professional. The "annex" also gave Dave access to a version of the world's most powerful supercomputer - the Connection Machine - upon which Dave programmed some of the largest scale neural networks of the time. In fact, Dave's first entrepreneurial success used his invention of a novel neural network algorithm to read handwriting, interpret x-ray images, and predict retail demand for consumer products. The commercial success of that technology provided early funding for the aforementioned DataSage.

As a member of the XPRIZE Innovation Board, Dave hopes to apply his parallel interests to the broader goals of pushing the limits of the possible, and applying technology carefully and thoughtfully to change the world for the better. With plenty on his plate, he finds balance with a passion for golf, tennis, sailing, skiing and hockey with his family and his extended family of lifelong friends.